About the Book
Reports from an Interior Province: New and Selected Poems traces Jeff Gundy's long journey as a restless, searching, embodied poet, rooted in his native Midwest and Mennonite tradition but constantly seeking new articulations, locations, and forms. Including work from eight published books and generous sets of new and uncollected poems, Reports showcases Gundy's enduring love of long-lined, unrhymed couplets that allow generous breathing space for his frequent swoops and veers among subjects and settings. His range also extends over brief lyrics, prose poems, and extended, multi-section narratives and meditations. Gundy's associative leaps and stretches flirt with surrealism and the fantastic, yet return often to natural landscapes and threads of quirky narrative.
"If Whitman were born in the Midwest to Mennonite parents, listened to Dylan and the Dead and loved to laugh at himself, observes Philip Metres, "he'd sound just like Jeff Gundy." Gundy traces both the sturdy beauties and the griefs and traumas of his home territory in poems like "Where I Live," from Flatlands: "how we love it, how we hate it, / how it did not quite kill us young."
His farm-boy earthiness has carried through Gundy's career as poet and professor, though Reports is also salted with poems about the small college life and leavened by generous doses of humor. "Most students believe they're more honest than most students," he observes ruefully in "Notes from the Faculty Meeting," and "After a national search, we hired Randy's brother."
Early on, Andrew Hudgins noted Gundy's characteristic theological curiosity, as well as his "verve, wit, passion, and deep intelligence." His poems have long contended with doubt and reverence, edging toward the mystical but refusing dogmatism.
Restless curiosity, and a Fulbright grant, led Gundy to extended stays in Salzburg and Lithuania, as well as many briefer journeys, and his poems often find fresh energy and unexpected rewards in encounters with new landscapes, cities, and people. "So much easier to blow things up than to get them right," he writes in "Rhapsody with Dark Matter," set in "the finest little town in Arkansas." "Letter to J. from the Ramada Inn Western Avenue, Albany" culminates with a main theme of his long career: "God wants / us all to love each other. But only / very slowly can we teach each other how."
About the Author :
Jeff Gundy grew up on a farm in central Illinois and studied at Goshen College and Indiana University, where he earned his Ph.D. He is Distinguished Poet in Residence at Bluffton University. His eight books of poems include Without a Plea and Abandoned Homeland (both from Bottom Dog, 2019 and 2015), Somewhere Near Defiance (Anhinga, 2014), for which he was named Ohio Poet of the Year, and Spoken among the Trees (Akron, 2007), winner of the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize. Earlier prose books include Songs from an Empty Cage (Cascadia, 2013), Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing (Cascadia, 2005), winner of the Dale E Brown Award, and A Community of Memory: My Days with George and Clara (Illinois, 1996). Recent poems and essays are in Georgia Review, The Sun, Kenyon Review, Forklift, Ohio, Christian Century, Image, Cincinnati Review, Terrain, and other journals. A 2008 Fulbright lecturer at the University of Salzburg, he taught regularly at the Antioch Writers Workshop and Language of Nature workshops in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Lynn Powell writes, "Impish, probing, and expansive, Gundy's poems reward the mind and replenish the spirit." Of Wind Farm, Scott Russell Sanders says "[Gundy] carried along from his rural upbringing riches of imagination that are abundantly displayed in these pages." His web page is https: //jeffgundy.com/
Review :
Truly a wonderful book. The portrait of the speaker that emerges is one of a neighborly metaphysician, a deep, quirky, philosophical, humorous mind surveying the world and everything in it with great care, compassion, pity. -Li-Young LeeJeff Gundy isn't afraid of writing in the direction of the weird, strange, uncanny or odd -all words he isn't afraid to use in a poem either -nor does he fear writing directly toward beauty, truth and God.-Julia KasdorfIf Whitman were born in the Midwest to Mennonite parents, listened to Dylan and the Dead and loved to laugh at himself, he'd sound just like Jeff Gundy. His poetry reminds us, over and over, that paying attention to the delights and troubles of existence becomes a kind of psalm to this botched and beautiful creation.-Philip Metres Jeff Gundy writes immensely sane poetry made rarer by its simultaneous preservation of recklessness, surely one of poetry's primary tasks. -Dean YoungI don't know how long it's been since I've read a book in which the author seemed to be so constantly in motion, so restless in his insatiable curiosity. How very attractive I find that, especially when it comes borne on genuine humility and unaffected generosity. This is a remarkable collection.-Ted KooserReading Flatlands, you feel the author's honesty palpably, his lack of side; these are genuine, searching poems, with no airs about them, full of wry wonder and warmth.-Jean ValentineInquiries possesses more theological curiosity than any book I've read in years, and Gundy engages his subjects with verve, wit, passion, and deep intelligence.-Andrew Hudgins
